


Flexibility

by VanishingPoint



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Dream Violence, Genderfluid Character, M/M, Torture, real violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 04:35:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20370775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanishingPoint/pseuds/VanishingPoint
Summary: If you want to get anywhere in the dreamshare industry, you have to have a good imagination. Arthur, however, has it on good authority that he doesn't have an imaginative bone in his body.





	Flexibility

When people talk about dream logic, they tend to talk about physics. Gravity. Paradoxes. That’s all Arthur had really considered in the couple of years he’d spent dreamsharing. This was back when he was in the military, running special ops for interrogation, and he was damn good at it. The best, as far as he knew. It was hardly a big industry at that point.

So when Arthur met his first forger and it turned out to be this cocky British guy with a terrible green shirt and fucked up teeth, he wasn’t impressed. He’d already told his CO that they didn’t need a forger, and as soon as he met the guy he was more than convinced that they didn’t need _that_ particular forger.

The British guy introduced himself as a James Brown, and looked distinctly unmilitary. Arthur said as much. The guy smiled tightly and said, “Yeah, never really took to following orders. You know how it is.”

In dreams, Arthur had seen people change their bodies a bit. It usually wasn’t intentional—some folks manifested in dreams as a little taller or smaller, a little prettier or less so, maybe with or without whatever style and facial hair they were sporting topside. None of this prepared him for working with James.

They’d been planning together for a few days maybe, long enough to get to know each other a bit, when they finally went under as a pair. It was just going to be the two of them—the drugs weren’t as good back in those days. They couldn’t support a dream stable enough for a large group of minds filling it. Dreamshares were generally two-man jobs.

Arthur drifted off on a padded table and woke to find himself standing in a field. Loose, wet soil shifted beneath his sneakers. The sun was just finished rising over distant green hills. He turned to ask James where they were supposed to be and saw a complete stranger beside him. A tall man, in his fifties, sporting a bushy white beard that framed his tanned face like a cloud.

Arthur yelped, staggered backward, caught his foot on a stone and fell flat on his ass.

The man laughed at him, revealing an impressive row of straight white teeth. Even so, Arthur had already been laughed at enough by this man that something in that laughter clicked in his head and he said, “James, what the hell.”

The bastard, still laughing, reached out a hand and helped haul Arthur to his feet. When Arthur was upright, old-man James patted his shoulder with a gnarled hand and said, “What did you think a forger was, darling?”

#

He’d never tell any of them, the smug assholes, but Arthur had no idea how forgers did their work. He understood it on an intellectual level. They needed a strong spacial and visual memory, immaculate attention to detail, and oscar-worthy acting skills involved. They had to be delicate and unobtrusive enough that their changes didn’t upset the stability of the dream or draw angry projections. He knew imagination factored in somehow, but he had it on good authority—not the least of which being his high school art teacher—that he didn’t have an imaginative bone in his body.

After Arther left the military—honorable discharge with a treason-level of secrecy around the work he’d been doing—he’d quickly moved into the underground dreamsharing world. It hadn’t even occurred to him to try getting a normal job. There wasn’t another job in the world that could hold his attention.

At this point, James had disappeared briefly from the dreamshare community and reemerged calling himself Eames. Arthur once asked him if he’d misspelled his name on paperwork somewhere down the line and just decided to run with it. Eames laughed, told him to fuck off, but never actually denied it.

They crossed paths again while doing a favor and running some tests for a chemist. People were just starting to realize that they could alter the original mixtures used by the military. Endless possibilities. Huge crapshoot. Anything could go wrong.

Arthur and Eames had gone down under a mix with some kind of stimulant, meant to speed up brain activity, giving them more time in the dream. They were timed to go under for a minute, which should have resulted in about twenty minutes dream time with this mix, but they’d long passed the twenty-minute mark and Arthur was getting antsy.

They were on the back porch of a smallish house, seated across from each other on a couple of old lawn chairs, summer sweat making their light shirts cling to their skin. It was mid-evening, and the sky was blanketed with yellow-tinged thunderclouds. Lightning forked across the horizon, trailed by the chesty bass hum of thunder. It should rain soon, but Arthur was the dreamer and didn’t really want the light show to end. Besides, he needed practice on his weather control anyway.

Eames, as was his habit when bored in-dream, was rapid-firing through disguises—faces, hair, clothing. It seemed to be his dream-equivalent of twiddling his thumbs. It had also been a little sickening to watch, the first time Arthur had watched him do it. Now, though, he was mostly just fascinated and had to be careful not to stare.

“Think we should bail out?” Eames said. He gestured loosely at the pistol resting on the off-white plastic lawn table.

“No. Not yet,” Arthur said. There were worse things than a bit of unexpected downtime, and he wasn’t really in the mood to shoot himself. The horror of it was mostly gone at this point, but that didn’t make it a pleasant exercise. “Let’s give it a few more minutes.” He watched the sky a bit longer and tried not to admit to himself that he was watching Eames out of the corner of his eye. Without really meaning to, he asked, “How’d you get into forging?” Most everyone in the business that Arthur had met at that point had started out in some kind of research or military position. Neither of those options really seemed to fit Eames.

Eames looked at him, sporting a convincing replica of the current vice president. “Why do you ask?”

Arthur shrugged. There were other forgers, sure, but Eames was a cut above the rest. “I haven’t really worked with anybody else that can do what you do.”

Eames smirked, then summoned a mirror out of nowhere and prodded at his face, seemingly unimpressed with whatever reflection it was that he was trying to accomplish. “Why Arthur, did you just pay me a compliment?”

Arther shook his head and leaned back in his chair. Its weathered plastic creaked beneath his weight. “I’d hardly call it that.”

“Ah.” Eames pointed a finger at him. “No take backs.”

Arthur waited. He knew Eames pretty well at this point. The man couldn’t handle silence for long.

Sure enough, Eames finally tossed the mirror aside—where it frisbeed away and promptly blipped out of existence—and sat back to watch the sky. His face was back to its normal scruffy self as he said, “I gambled. Crossed the wrong people. They weren’t terribly impressed with my hustling them. They wanted to figure out what I’d done with their money, so someone hired and extractor.”

He said all of this with a faint smile, but Arthur had met some of the hamfisted, lowbrow types of “extractors” that tended to do that kind of work.

“Thing was,” Eames continued, “They didn’t know I’ve always been something of a lucid dreamer. And of course, I had no idea what dreamsharing was at the time. So they’re banking on me thinking I’m actually about to lose some kneecaps, meanwhile I caught on after a bit that it was a dream. I just thought I was having some nightmare that I couldn’t wake myself up from and responded accordingly.” He shot a sideways glance at Arthur, who knew firsthand exactly the kind of havoc that Eames’s _responding accordingly_ could look like.

“How’d you pick it up so fast?”

Eames thought about it. “You know when you were in school, and you’d get bored and start imagining things?”

“Like what?” Arthur asked.

“Oh, well.” Eames looked almost embarrassed. “Like growing wings during gym, or everybody in the class swapping faces and such. Imagining what would happen if gravity stopped working and you had to grab onto something to keep from floating away. You know what I mean.”

Arthur laughed. “No. No I don’t.”

“Oh. Hmm.” Eames pursed his lips in thought. “Well, if you had an ounce of imagination in your body—” He cut off at a sudden flash of lightning right overhead, in perfect time with Arthur’s spike of annoyance, and then the timer must have run out right then, because Arthur woke up to Eames laughing at him. Again.

#

“Is it difficult?” Arthur asked. He watched Eames primp, pouting at herself in the reflection of a tinted car window outside the nightclub. Arthur couldn’t imagine putting on a woman’s face, her voice, moving through a space in a body so different from his own.

“Is what difficult?” Eames asked, delicate fingers rearranging the gentle curls that fell in waves around her petite face. She smiled at herself. She’d given herself a small gap between her teeth. Her lips were full and glossed. Arthur had a brief, bizarre desire to lean in and see if they tasted as good as they looked. When Eames’s dark eyes met Arthur’s, Arthur looked away.

Eames, spotting their mark, caught a small hand in Arthur’s lapel and leaned against him, her perfumed head resting on his chest. She was supposed to be the mark’s ex. Drunk, hanging on another man. Perfect bait.

“This part’s easy,” Eames murmured in her smooth high voice, lips brushing Arthur’s neck, right below his ear. She discreetly turned Arthur so as to give the mark a better view. “I’d switch things up topside if I could, now and then. Wouldn’t you? One body’s terribly boring.”

Arthur didn’t have anything to say to that, so he played his part—it was just a part, of course—and put his hands on Eames’s slender hips and pulled her close against him.

As planned, the mark was a jealous asshole. He stomped over, decked Arthur in the face, and hauled Eames away. Eames, grimacing at the tight hold on her narrow forearm, staggered to catch up. It was a power fantasy, after all, and it only worked if the damsel in distress played along. Eames pulled the mark into a kiss. She eased her reddening wrist smoothly out of the mark’s grip, moving instead to wrap it passionately over his neck.

Arthur’s jaw stung, but that was nothing in comparison to the aching pit in his stomach as Eames and the mark ambled into the club together.

The extraction went well. Arthur got the info they needed, rifled from the nightclub safe while Eames entertained the mark on the dance floor. After they woke, while Arthur scrambled to write down the numbers and dates, Eames sat on the couch across from the still-snoring mark and chatted with their chemist over a fresh cup of coffee. He rubbed his wrist absently.

Later that night, the two of them pushed their little flirtation game a little too far and Arthur found himself with his back against the wall, wrapped in the smell of cigarettes and rum as Eames sucked on that same spot on his neck, right below his ear. On a whim, Arthur caught Eames’s hand, wove their fingers together and placed a firm kiss against his wrist.

Eames rolled his eyes, but he was smiling with all of his teeth when he reached down, picked Arthur up with an ease that made Arthur’s head spin, and kissed him senseless.

#

“You know I’ve got a degree in psychology?” Eames said this with a slur in his voice. They were in Mombasa, and the job hadn’t gone well. They were celebrating their failure with yet another round of drinks.

“No shit,” Arthur said.

“Mm,” Eames said. “I hear therapists can make okay money. And I bet they don’t have to worry about getting booby trapped in the jungle.” Their mark had been a Vietnam War buff. Of all the wars to choose.

“I bet they don’t,” Arthur agreed.

#

Arthur was in New York, and he wasn’t feeling great about this next job. Generally he didn’t take jobs that already had assembled teams—he liked having a say in who he was working with and what they’d be doing. But, Eames was on the team at least. There was a non-zero chance that one of them might end up in the other’s hotel room again. So that was a nice thing to hope for.

And all that aside, Arthur was honestly tight enough on money that he didn’t really have the luxury of being picky.

So, when he woke up in his hotel room with a gun pointed in his direction, it honestly felt kind of inevitable.

He squinted against the lights and took stock. Three men, all armed and in casual jeans and button downs, their faces covered.

Arthur, in just his undershirt and boxers, might as well have been naked. He’d gone to sleep with his gun on the bedside stand, but they must have moved it before he woke. He was usually a light sleeper. He wondered if he was drugged.

He sat up slowly, put on his mildest expression and said, “How can I help you?” As he said that, he was rifling through names in his head—enemies, old marks, anybody with bad blood. He hadn’t pissed off anybody in New York, as far as he knew.

“So polite,” the middle man said. He gestured with his gun for Arthur to stand. Arthur did so, slowly, hands up, sweat pricking in the center of his back. He felt strangely weak, unsteady on his legs, a sensation that only worsened when one of the other man gripped his shoulders and forced him into the desk chair. The man zip-tied his wrists together, looping it through a slat in the chair’s back.

“This is unnecessary,” Arthur said, still racing to catch up as the situation very clearly wheeled further out of his control. “If there’s something you need from me, let’s talk about it.” He was loyal where it counted, but if this was some kind of corporate espionage bullshit or anything like that, there was a good chance he could tell them whatever they wanted to know without so much as a twinge of regret. He liked to keep things simple that way. There were few things so important to him that he’d be willing to die for them.

“We already know everything we need,” the man in the middle said. “Though if you feel like volunteering the name was of your partner, I wouldn’t say no.”

“Which partner?” Arthur asked. His mind jumped to Cobb, long out of the game and just reconnecting with his family, and he felt sick. “Whatever this is about, it can’t be worth—” he cut off as the man aimed a heavy kick at his shin with a sharp-toed boot. He gritted his teeth.

Someone else in the room chuckled. Arthur finally noticed a fourth man in the room. He was leaned up against the wall, arms crossed, dressed in a suit with a silk dress shirt. It took Arther a moment to place him, but when he did, he gritted his teeth. The jealous mark. The one that Eames had entertained while Arthur stole all of the info necessary to prove that his club was being used as a cover for human trafficking.

“Yeah,” the mark said. “I know your face, asshole. And I’ll find that bitch you were with, too.”

Shit. Not information, then. Just plain old revenge. Can’t talk your way out of that.

Arthur took one last glance around the room, then kicked out as hard as he could. He caught the middle man in the chest, knocking the gun out of his hand and sending him stumbling backward. Before the other men could pull their guns free, Arthur was on his feet, chair still stuck awkwardly to him. He made for the window—he was on the second floor, he might make it.

A silenced gunshot spat through the air. He felt an impact in the back of his right arm. He staggered, then fell as a meaty forearm caught him around the chest and hauled him back to the center of the room. He wrenched on the zip tie, hoping it would break but only succeeding in making the plastic cut into his wrists. The bullet wound was a point of searing pain, but he still twisted and kicked and, belatedly, started yelling. It was the middle of the night in a busy hotel. Somebody must be hearing this.

“Let go of me,” he snarled. He could feel blood running down his arm, dripping from his fingertips. He raised his voice, “Somebody! Help me! Call the—” He cut off with a gasp as the man in the middle lifted the gun and shot him right in the stomach. It punched the air out of his lungs. He stared down at the little hole in the thin white fabric of his shirt. Blood bloomed from the spot. He tried to say something, but nothing came out.

“It’s just us,” the middle man said, his face right beside Arthur’s now, voice full of false commiseration. He caught Arthur’s eye, then looked down meaningfully. Arthur followed his gaze numbly, and saw the man press the barrel of the gun against the side of Arthur’s bare knee. Arthur squeezed his eyes shut.

Even with the silencer, the gunshot point blank was deafeningly loud. The scream tore itself out of him. He curled in on himself, struggling to breathe, and for a single, sharp moment, he felt very separate from his own pain. He stared down at the bloody pulp of his leg and realized that this didn’t make sense.

He was dreaming. He had to be dreaming. This couldn’t be real. Nobody could lose this much blood and still be this conscious and clear-headed. God, he hoped this was a dream. He sat up sharply and threw his head back against the wall as hard as he could. Black spots bloomed in his vision. He threw his head back again. One of the goons caught the back of his neck and yanked his head down.

“Finally figured it out, huh?” the man said, lips pursed in mock sympathy. “Well don’t go yet.” He reached out a gloved hand and pressed his fingers into the wound, the image impossible, nightmarish as he pressed knuckle-deep into the mass of splintered bone and flesh and muscle. For a moment, Arthur could hear himself making some terrible sound before the agony blotted everything else out. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t think. He was blacking out.

“Oh no, this is my dream,” the man said. “Don’t you go passing out on me.” As he said so, Arthur felt himself jerked back into terrible clarity. The man continued his prodding, and Arthur thrashed against the chair, unable to properly scream now and instead choking on his own breaths. Arthur felt bile burning up his throat, but he couldn’t vomit. The man pulled his hand free of the gore and wiped his glove on Arthur’s face. He tilted Arthur’s head to the side, thumb swiping at the tears and spit on his lips and said, “How we doing?”

Arthur just looked at him. He was bathed in sweat, shivering, his body simulating the symptoms of shock even if his consciousness wasn’t allowed to follow suit. Half-possible plans flitted around at the back of his head, but there was nothing. Nothing to do but wait it out. God. He sobbed, then gathered himself and let the saliva and bile pool in his mouth and spat at the man’s face.

The man sat back. He wiped the spray from his chin, then said, “All right.” He cracked his knuckles, and then gripped Arthur’s shoulders and shoved him, tipping him up onto one side of his chair, and then sending him and the chair tumbling heavily to the ground. Arthur blacked out again, but was once more dragged back to alertness. He groaned and pressed his the side of his face into the carpet. Blood was bubbling out of his mouth, from the stomach wound no doubt.

The man settled into a crouch beside him, but there was some commotion happening in the room, and then one of the goons gasped, took a couple of steps, and toppled to the ground.

“What—” the torturer began, but then he, too jerked, lost control of his limbs, and then fell dead on the carpet in front of Arthur. The other two men followed quick suit, and in less than a half minute, Arthur was alone in a room full of dead bodies.

A moment later, and another figure blipped into existence. He turned in a quick circle, eyes scanning the body on the floor, then caught sight of Arthur and rushed over to crouch beside him. Eames looked terrible. His expression was wild, twisted in a way that Arthur had never seen it before, but it smoothed with obvious effort as he met Arthur’s eyes. “Hi, love,” he said, one hand reaching delicately to the side of Arthur’s face.

_Eames_, Arthur tried to say. Instead, it came out as a ragged sob. _Please_, he tried to say, and knew his lips were forming the word at least.

“Arthur,” Eames said, leaning forward until Arthur’s drifting gaze met his again. “Love, I couldn’t wake you up top. They’ve got you sedated, and there’s still a lot of time on the clock. You understand what I’m saying?”

Arthur did. If Eames killed him now, it was possible that the mix was strong enough that Arthur’s mind would just drop deeper instead of waking up. He struggled to get his mouth to move. After a moment of gasping like a fish, he finally managed, “_Please._”

“Okay,” Eames said. “Okay.” He pressed his lips to the side of Arthur’s forehead, and then he picked up the torturer’s gun and held the barrel to the same spot.

Arthur knew he should be afraid, but he felt himself relax into that chill touch before it knocked him into numb oblivion.

He woke in the process of scrambling upright. He was back in his hotel bed, a dreamshare line trailing from the crook of his arm. The pain of the dream echoed into his physical body as a deep, cramping ache in his knee, and to a lesser degree in his arm and belly.

He groaned and let himself lie back. He’d been injured in dreams plenty of times before, but nothing with this much clarity, or that lingered so heavily upon waking. He hoped to god that whoever the chemist was for this mix was dead in this room.

And there were a lot of dead people in the room. The four men in his dream, all clustered on their backs around his bed, laying peacefully but for the red holes in the side of each of their heads. The two other bodies in the room—guards, likely—were laid out by the door, the exact opposite of peaceful.

And then there was Eames. He was stretched out on the bed beside Arthur. He’d gone under so quickly that he wasn’t even lying flat, instead slumped gracelessly on his side, arms splayed in front of him, his knuckles just barely brushing Arthur’s side.

Arthur lay on his back and watched as Eames blinked his eyes open, and then levered upright. “Jesus,” Eames said. “Did you—?”

Arthur knew he was asking about limbo. He shook his head minutely.

“Good.” Eames leaned over and pulled the line from Arthur’s arm. He pressed a thumb over the spot of blood, and then reached with his other hand to massage at Arthur’s leg, where the cramp was visible in his bare calf and thigh. Arthur hissed, but didn’t push him off.

“So was this about that club job?” Eames said. He jerked his chin at the body on the floor by the lamp. “That’s the guy with the anger issues. I thought he was in prison. Where are your clothes?”

Arthur pointed. While Eames went to fetch them from the back of the desk chair, Arthur attempted to sit up.

“That’s it, Eames,” Arthur said. His voice was hoarse, his throat raw. “I’m out. I’m done with this.”

“That’s why we’ve gotta get your trousers on, love,” Eames said with exaggerated patience. He braced his arms under Arthur to help him upright. Between the leftover sedative and his cramping muscles, Arthur couldn’t do much more than lean against him and try not to get in the way while Eames shoved him into his clothes.

“No,” Arthur said. “All this bullshit.” He meant extraction in general. The kind of work that seemed to always end with a gun in his face.

“Oh.” Eames paused, then said, “Alright.” He sat Arthur back down, crouched in front of him and shoved Arthur’s foot into a shoe.

No socks. “Ugh,” Arthur said.

Eames laughed and tied the laces. When he was done, he dropped his palms to Arthur’s knees and said, “So let’s figure out something else for us to do.”

#

Arthur groaned, suspended in darkness. Eames was mouthing at the back of his neck and, impossibly, also nipping at the underside of his jaw. He also had his mouth wrapped around his cock, and had been teasing him like a bastard for god knew how long.

Turned out therapists did make good money. Dream therapists even more so. And dream therapists that were more than happy to facilitate the odd BDSM scene now and then? They made bank.

He didn’t know how long they’d been at it, but he was close. He said as much, and Eames’s mouth backed off.

“_Fuck_,” Arthur said, while Eames coalesced back into one and reappeared to kiss him against a wall that had just appeared out of nowhere. “How long did you need to test your mix, again?” Arthur managed to say, when he came up for air. He found that, even though there weren’t any restraints on him, he could hardly move.

“Why?” Eames murmured. He nosed at Arthur’s throat, ran his hands from his throat all the way down to his hips, eliciting a full-body shiver. “You complaining?”

Arthur’s mouth was dry. “Never.”

Eames grinned, showing every one of his fucked up teeth. He gave Arthur a push. The wall disappeared, and Arthur fell back onto a plush bed, his hands and feet sliding and failing to gain purchase on immaculate silk. Eames settled gracefully to straddle his belly. Arthur was still naked, but Eames was now in a pale purple button down, the sleeves rolled to reveal his forearms, the stiff trouser material rough against Arthur’s bare skin. Arthur recognized the ensemble as his own clothes. He rolled his eyes and tried to look unimpressed even as the pit of his stomach flashed impossibly hotter.

While Eames didn’t look any more muscular than usual, he was absurdly, unreasonably strong as he gathered up Arthur’s wrists and pinned them to the bed above his head. His lips brushed Arthur’s as he rumbled, “You ready?”

At least, Arthur thought, when he inevitably died from lack of blood to his brain, he’d be able to wake up and do it all over again. “Yeah,” he gasped.

God, what he wouldn’t give for an imagination.

**Author's Note:**

> Rewatched Inception recently and had to get these two out of my head. Hope y'all enjoy it!


End file.
